Questions Notions Research Articles

Homotopical smallness and closeness

The aim of this paper is to introduce the concepts of homotopical smallness and closeness. These are the properties of homotopical classes of maps that are related to recent developments in homotopy theory and to the construction of universal covering spaces for non-semi-locally simply connected spaces, in particular to the properties of being homotopically Hausdorff and homotopically path Hausdorff. The definitions of notions in question and their role in homotopy theory are supplemented by examples, extensional classifications, universal constructions and known applications.

Output Stabilization of Strongly Minimum-phase Systems

In this work it is shown that adapting the notions of relative degree and strong minimum-phaseness introduced in Liberzon et al. IEEE Trans. Automat. Control 47 (3) 2002, it is possible to obtain global stabilization results via output feedback. The notions in question are coordinate-free; consequently, it is not required that the system is transformed into normal form. The stabilization methods are based on small-gain arguments and provide global results.

What's in a name? The semantics of quorum sensing

The expression of many bacterial phenotypes is regulated according to the concentration of chemical cues that they or other bacteria produce, a process often termed quorum sensing (QS). Many aspects of the environment can affect cue concentration. Thus these molecules might be indirect proxies for any one or combination of environmental factors. Recent research suggests that the adaptive significance of QS varies depending on its evolutionary and ecological context. Consequently, some researchers have proposed new terms, each emphasizing different adaptive functions, for the QS process. However, these new terms generate potential for a semantic quagmire and perpetuate the questionable notion that we can identify a single, dominant environmental feature to which the microbes respond. In fact, the ecological context of QS regulation, like the process itself, is complex and impacted by multiple aspects of natural environments.

Harvey B. Milkman, Stanley G. Sunderwirth: Craving for Ecstasy and Natural Highs: A Positive Approach to Mood Alterations

From the outset, this book is impressive in the way its systematic, carefully crafted structure and engaging written style not only captures the reader’s interest but also offers a solid roadmap leading her/him to gain a full appreciation of the concepts and nuances of varied addiction: behavioral and substance-related. Addictions are defined as covering those compulsive human activities that are driven by the motivation to achieve hedonic states of pleasure that contain neurochemical correlates. Included within this domain are alcohol and licit and illicit drugs, the Internet, Online pornography, gambling and obesity to mention but a few. Setting aside the questionable notion that people can be addicted to the Internet, the Internet being simply a medium through which people can access the object of their desires, this book’s focus lies on trying to understand and explain the processes underlying how and why people repeatedly seek and engage in pleasures despite adverse consequences to themselves or others. Similar to the perspective espoused by Shaffer et al. (2004), and West (2006), the authors adopt the premise that, although the phenomenological manifestations of addiction are diverse, addiction is a syndrome where certain shared commonalities leading to out-ofcontrol reward-seeking behaviours are found. One of the clear strengths of the book is the manner in which the authors attempt to integrate basic neuroscience with psychological and cognitive processes embedded within a sociological and ecological framework in explaining the myriad of reasons why people end up seeking states of ecstasy; self-medication, emotional escape and oblivion, excitement and positive states of exhilaration. These objectives are achieved through taking external substances or behavioural pursuits. The book contains seven sections divided into broad categories of stress reduction, thrill seeking, escape into fantasy and intimacy. The final sections deal with management from an intrinsically cognitive behavioural framework and the production of alternative non-harmful natural highs. Each section is characterised by an excellent integration of biological, psychological and ecological factors involved in the acquisition and maintenance phase of addictive behaviours. The first section of the book sets the basis for arguing that people seek the experience of pleasure through a variety of means, and that this experience is Int J Ment Health Addiction (2011) 9:226–228 DOI 10.1007/s11469-010-9270-9

African and Afrikaner 'ways of knowing': Truth and the problems of superstition and 'blood knowledge'

The approbation, in the last few decades, of ‘African ways of knowing’ and, more recently, the critical emphasis on ‘knowledge in the blood’—which refers to ‘deeply entrenched’ and ‘received knowledge’, notably of (white) Afrikaners—give rise to all kinds of questions and concerns. What makes certain ways of knowing and kinds of knowledge ‘African’ and ‘Afrikaner’, respectively? What do these ideas cover and include, and what falls outside their respective ambits? What functions are served by appealing to these notions? Amongst other things, the idea of ‘African ways of knowing’ constitutes part of a challenge to occidental belief systems, science, education and ethics. Theorists who single out certain ways of knowing as distinctly and uniquely ‘African’ or characteristically ‘Afrikaner’, respectively, not only emphasise their significance in post-colonialist and antiracist discourse but also maintain that the study of these is of profound relevance to educational and socio-political transformation. In this paper, I examine the notions in question, by seeking to understand how those who employ them might see them as plausible, before referring them to a particular epistemological framework. Problems that need to be addressed include relativism about knowledge and truth, as well as elevation of all kinds of beliefs—notably superstitions and racial prejudices—to the status of knowledge, for any real and sustainable transformation to occur.

Substantial City: Reflections On Aristotle’s Politics

Minimally, Aristotle’s account of the ‘city’ (polis) is isomorphic with his metaphysical doctrine of substance (ousia) and teleological conception of nature. Maximally, his political theory depends on it. Part I explains what this means. Part II discusses the significant consequences the notion of a ‘substantial city’ has for Aristotle’s political theory. Part III suggests how this notion can be deployed to address the notorious question of whether the Politics forms a unified whole, or whether Books 4, 5 and 6 — the ‘realist’ or empirical books—simply cannot be reconciled with Books 1, 2, 3, 7 and 8, the more ‘idealist’ or even ‘Platonist’ side of the work.

“Only Not beyond Love”: Testimony, Subalternity, and the Famine in The Poetry of Eavan Boland

The poetry of Eavan Boland, Ireland’s leading woman poet, is marked by an acute awareness of the problems attendant on the recovery of the experience of subaltern or oppressed women. Rather than usurping the place of the other and presuming to speak for her, Boland’s work stages the poet’s attempt to gain access to the experience of the other and ponders the difficulties and contradictions involved in this endeavour. It does not so much perform an act of ventriloquism—it does not make the subaltern speak, to invoke Gayatri Spivak’s notorious question—as interrogate her silencing and bear witness to an experience that remains fundamentally irrecoverable. Through an analysis of a number of poems which commemorate the victims of the Famine (“The Achill Woman,” “Outside History,” “The Journey,” and “Fever”), I argue that at the heart of Boland’s testimonial project is an ethics of love—love, not as self-serving benevolence, narcissism, or fusion, but as a non-appropriative encounter with the other which calls the self into question. This ethical love manifests itself not in the poet’s recovery of the voices of subaltern women, but in her invention of a mode of writing that bears witness to its own incapacity of recovering what lies outside history.

The Multiple Sites of Urban Governance: Insights from an African City

Contemporary modes of urban governance involve a wide variety of actors. The present paper combines insights from several debates into a framework that considers the multiple sites where practices of governance are exercised and contested, various and entangled layers of relations and a broad range of practices of governance that may involve various modes of power, as well as different scales. The paper illustrates some of these complexities with an empirical study of the governance of marketplaces in Maputo, Mozambique. It shows how urban governance in a context of extensive informalisation and `democratic transition' can be highly fragmented and fluid, contesting some of the assumptions underlying Western debates on urban governance. It also questions notions of the hollowed-out state and an excessive focus on public policy.

Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis (review)

Reviewed by: Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis Richard Cavell Alexander John Watson . Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis. University of Toronto Press. xi, 526. $65.00 Harold Innis was a 'marginal' man in both the personal and the political sense: a Baptist from a farm near Otterville, Ontario, he made his name in the metropolitan centre as a professor at the University of Toronto, where, politically, he increasingly became the spokesperson for unpopular views, repeatedly threatening to resign when these views were [End Page 335] not acknowledged. He likewise focused his studies in political economy on those areas marginal to empires; it was on the political margin, he argued, where the civilizing efforts of empire were renewed. But his 'dark vision' was that the prospect of renewal was especially problematical in the twentieth century, a realization that owed much to Innis's appalling experiences in the First World War and his despair at the onset of a second world war. It was particularly the overwhelming spatial bias of the American empire that troubled Innis, in that it ignored the time-binding aspects of the oral tradition, on which Innis pinned his hopes. He ended his career – abruptly, as a result of terminal cancer – with a 'plea for time' that was largely ignored by those who thought his career had gone awry with his inquiries into the nature of communications that occupied him at the end. The one major revelation in this book – though it comes more as an assertion than as a fact – was that Innis turned to communications, in a strangely compensatory way, from his studies of staple economies, to assuage his hurt at being spurned by his colleague Irene Biss, with whom he had fallen in love. This is not exactly the revelation that one would expect in an intellectual biography; one would have assumed that much more attention would have been directed to Innis's encounters at the University of Chicago, where he wrote his doctorate. For example, a glancing reference is made to Robert Ezra Park that belies Park's importance for this study, not only for his notion of the 'marginal man' whose fate it is to live in two 'antagonistic cultures,' and of 'dirt[y] research,' of which Watson makes much, but also as a student of the great George Simmel, whose spatial theories are relevant to 'the problem of space' that Innis was seeking to solve through his communications studies. The problem of space, for Innis, was its tendency toward totalization; Watson presents Innis as a process thinker for whom the oral tradition was attractive because it was by nature incomplete. It is probably impossible to approach Innis without the mediation of Marshall McLuhan's seminal 'The Later Innis' (1952); Watson takes issue with much of this essay, though his approach is reductive and without benefit of the scholarship that has grown up in the wake of Philip Marchand's 1989 biography. Watson does agree with McLuhan's comment that Innis's greatest achievement was the methodological structure he produced in Empire and Communications and The Bias of Communication – a form of radical juxtaposition – rather than the content of his essays. Watson's book could have been edited down from its 500þ pages; we learn much more than we need to about the Innis farm where Harold grew up, and the questionable notion that farming taught him 'pattern recognition,' and about the internal politics of the Political Economy [End Page 336] Department at the University of Toronto during Innis's reign. Where the book is most useful is in nuancing the blind spots of previous biographies of Innis (as well as of Innis's own, deeply reticent, autobiography), though this does not mean it replaces them; indeed, one of the shortest of such studies, Eric Havelock's, remains pithily pertinent to Innis studies. On 10 November 1952 the University of Toronto cancelled all classes in memory of Innis, who had died two days before. Innis had championed the university as the last bastion of the oral tradition and the civilizing tendencies it represented, and one still glimpses that possibility – now, alas, from afar – in the university's gesture...

Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief by Theodore Ziolkowski

Io98 Reviews Wien! (Vienna: Bohlau, I994)). Rose's publication contains a superb bibliography of primary and secondary literature, including what must be themost comprehensive list to date of Louis Huart's and Albert Smith's publications-a key to further re search into thenineteenth-century culture of entertainment and instruction. UNIVERSITY OF EXETER MARTINA LAUSTER Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief. By THEODORE ZIOL KOWSKI. Chicago and London: University ofChicago Press. 2007. xii + 283 pp. $35. ISBN 978-o-226-98363-9. This book consists largely of a series of skilfully summarized descriptions of several European works, mainly fictionand poetry, ofwriters living in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth.The selection of authors and the literaryworks theyproduced is based on what Theodore Ziolkowski identi fiesas a common theme, 'The crisis of faith that shook Europe in the decades before and afterWorld War i and the responses that crisis elicited as individuals sought surrogates to fillthe spiritual emptiness in theirminds and souls' (p. x). He identifies five 'modes of faith' as surrogates for religion-'art forart's sake, the flight to India, socialism, myth, and utopian vision' (p. xi). The author avoids any systematic, persuasive philosophical reflectionon thehistori cal or ideological conditions in which the loss of faithexperienced by these individuals was embedded. He has focused primarily on thewriters as individuals, and the impact theymade on those around them, usually members of the same privileged literate elite,while glimpses of thewider historical conditions of existence enter only to that degree without which the creative genius of these fascinating, passionate, and often highly disturbed men (they aremainly men) would be comprehensible. These wider contexts are of course there in the narrative, for the experiences and cultural practices of these novelists and poets would be unintelligible without them. The wider social and intellectual history necessarily gets referred to as part of the recounting of thebiographical details, and in the summaries of thecontents and forms of fiction,poetry, autobiography, travelwriting, and aesthetic philosophizing. As one review succeeds another, summarizing thechildhoods, themarital problems, thepsy chological torments, the conversions and retractions, the fantasies, the trials, tribula tions, and pilgrimages of the subjects who form the objects of the author's smooth prose, much is said inpassing about the erosion of thegrip ofCatholic faithand tra ditional Church practice and authority, the development of capitalism, atheism and science, themassive shiftsof power exemplified by colonialism or Communism-in short theprocesses that tormented and confused the sensibilities of these individuals who sought theirvarious 'surrogates'. But the substance of thebook lies in the authors themselves, and presumably Ziol kowski at least hopes to encourage us to read them, a valid aim itself.But the reason for publishing must depend in part on the added lightwhich he intends to shed by bringing them intomutual proximity, not only in terms of their shared historical epoch, but also on thegrounds that theyexemplify themeanings of his key organizing categories-common loss of faith in religion, and thediscoveries and inventions of,or conversions to, surrogate faithsor secular analogies to religion. But what do all these words mean? A major problem with thispotentially fascinating and instructive book is that the author does not critically reflecton his key terms, all ofwhich are historically con tested. The reader can infer that by 'religion' he is generally referring toChristian faith,particularly Catholicism, though religion isattributed to thepre-Christian Ro mans and the highly questionable notion of a 'primal religious sense' finds itsway MLR, I03.4, 2008 I099 into the text (p. 3). By 'surrogate' he means a secular alternative to religion, though again themeaning of 'secular' seems to be taken forgranted as well; nor is itclear if this termmeans the same thing as 'profane', as in the chapter called 'Theologians of theProfane'. Thus many of the so-called secular alternatives such as socialism or aestheticism either look like religion or actually are religion. For example, one of the chapters is called 'The Religion ofArt'. On the other hand, much of the discussion about the attractions of socialism, national socialism, and Communism isconducted in terms of 'quasi-religion' (p. i I9), 'a substitute for religion' (p. i I9) or 'political...

One Earth, Four or Five Words. The Peripheral Concept of “Avant-Garde”

Metaphors grow old, turn into dead metaphors, and finally become clichés. This succession seems to be inevitable - but on the other hand, poets have the power to return old clichés into words with a precise meaning. Accordingly, academic writers, too, need to carry out a similar operation with notions that are worn out by frequent use in everyday language. One metaphor that has been hollowed out in such a way, through lax use by journalists and literary historians, is the concept of "avant-garde". In this article, I shall try to shed some new light upon this notion, with the purpose of showing its different national use and heterogeneity of meaning. This pluralism is overlooked today because of the hegemony of English in academic studies, which leads one to believe that a consensus exists in the use of the term "avant-garde", since so many academics write their articles and books in this language. The current analysis is directed towards theoreticians' ways of dealing with the notion in question, by which I meaneverybody who writes or thinks about the notion of "avant-garde". This article is an attempt to recuperate the term to stringent use and gain a deeper insight into the aesthetic movements of modernity and late modernity. I hope to show that, despite the fact that many writers believe that there exists only one recognition of the notion of "avant-garde", the understanding of the Anglo-American "centre" is actually as peripheral as that of other countries - which are normally regarded as peripheries.

Beyond the Silver Screen

This article first highlights the relative paucity of literature on South Asian dance and provides a brief overview of existing material. It then examines particularly the influence of filmi or Bollywood dance on South Asian dance practices in the UK. It locates film dance within the Bollywood genre, noting its recent acceptance as a new form of popular culture and its attractions for the younger generation of British Asians. The place of dance in Hindi films is analysed and discussed briefly to con-textualise the relationship between such film dances and South Asian dance practices in Britain. Using evidence from fieldwork gathered in Leicester and London amongst dance teachers and students of South Asian dance, the article questions notions of identity, authenticity, tradition and the changing nature of dance transmission as Bollywood forms grow in popularity.

Problems, Policies and Ethics in Health Care

There are three factors necessary for the successful implementation of a policy. First, a problem has to be identified in a way that invites action. Second, there must be a policy that fits the problem in question. And third, there must be the political will to tackle the problem with the policy. Each of these factors is necessary but not sufficient for policy development; implementation requires a happy conjunction of all three. To date there has been little overt ethical analysis in relation to policy development by those identifying as ethicists. This paper describes three potential roles for ethics analysis in the problem-policy-politics nexus, arguing that ethicists have a role to play in the identification of problems and in the substantive and procedural evaluation of policies. In addition, wherever ethics language is used overtly, ethicists have a duty to investigate and offer critiques of the notions in question, both on their own merits and against accepted usage and normative frameworks.

Different Ways of Understanding the Construct of Successful Aging: Iranian Immigrants Speak About What Aging Well Means to Them

This article presents the variations in themes and notions of successful aging that were found in a project that aimed to shed light on the value orientations that people prefer and the understandings of successful aging that they uphold. The project, which aimed also to study the way in which the process of migration challenges the notions in question, shed light on the various types of logic that Iranian immigrants to Sweden use when trying to make sense of the construct of successful aging. This article departs from these variations and discusses, among other things, the inevitable decay with which the aging process seems to be associated; the different purpose-related ideologies that people use when trying to explain how the decay in question ought to be handled; the way in which time-related ideas influence the manner in which notions of aging well are framed; the manner in which divergent views regarding activity shape the understandings of successful aging that people uphold; and the way in which ideas regarding autonomy and dependence shape the way in which one defines a good old age. The complexity of logic types utilized by the informants suggests that, if researchers are to further their understanding of the meaning of the construct of successful aging, they need to dismantle people's ideas as well as the way in which they use culture when trying to make sense of what aging well entails. The article finishes with a brief discussion regarding the importance of intracultural variation and suggests that researchers need a better understanding of culture's impact on the manner in which the construct in question is understood if they are to develop the successful aging paradigm in a culturally informed manner.

Thou Shall not Diversify: Why Two of Every Sort?

The present paper sheds a new light on the notorious question in the evolutionary biology of why the modern species exhibit only the asexual and binary mating systems, with the clear dominance of the latter over the former. We present an in-depth study of the intertemporal propagation of the fundamental distributional properties of phenotypes in general polygenic multi-gender inheritance models with sex- and time-dependent heritability. We further analyze the implications of these models under thick-tailedness of traits' initial distributions. We obtain the results that demonstrate that, under an arbitrary multi-sex mating system with k genders, the Organism's switching to a more uniform mode of heritability leads to an increase in peakedness and concentration of traits with not extremely heavy-tailed initial distributions in its population in all the future periods. However, the decrease in the diversity of the parameters responsible for the different sexes' genetical contributions to the next period's offspring leads to an increase in concentration and peakedness of extremely long-tailed traits in all future generations. From these results it follows that switching to an inheritance system with greater diversity in heritability coeffcients and, thus, an increase in the number of genders under symmetric heritability, is advantageous in the case of extremely long-tailed traits that have negative effects on the population's fitness (say, human medical or behavioral disorders for which inheritance is significant). Such a switching or increase in the number of genders slows down or completely stops the intertemporal spread of the extremely thick-tailed negative traits in the population. On the other hand, a decrease in the number of genders in the symmetric multi-sex inheritance system and, more generally, switching to less diverse heritability parameters is advantageous in the case of not extremely thick-tailed positive traits (e.g., the trait of intelligence). Our theoretical results demonstrate that the intertemporal propagation of distributional properties of traits is, to a large extent, responsible for the dominance of the asexual and binary mating systems in nature. Namely, from the results obtained in the paper it follows that the switching between the asexual and binary inheritance mechanisms allows the population to achieve effectively a relatively fast decline (sharp concentration) of bad traits or a relatively quick spread (decrease of peakedness and concentration) of good traits, regardless of the distributional properties of the phenotypes in the initial period, in particular, regardless of the degree of heavy-tailedness of their initial densities. Furthermore, from our results it follows that, regardless of their initial distributional properties, the propagation of negative traits in a population with three or more genders can be prevented and the wide spread of positive phenotypes can be achieved immediately or in a relatively near future if the population switches to a mating system with only one or two genders. Given the high costs to species of developing and maintaining extra genders, this makes the asexual and binary inheritance mechanisms advantageous comparing to other mating systems.

Church and culture: A religio-theological perspective

The ethnic church (“volkskerk”) is central to the ecclesiology and Church Order of the Reformed Church in Africa (Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk). This article questions notions of culture, ethnicity, ethnic people (“volk”) and ethnic identity as backdrop for answering the question on the responsibility of the church towards cultural and ethnic identity. It is conceded that civil religion remains an insidious threat to the church, as is also civil ideology. Lastly, it is contended that the main responsibility of the church towards culture, ethnic people, ethnic and social identity is one of apostolic prophetic presence and outreach.

“Making the Margins Chaos”

Alfredo Véa Jr.’s 1993 novel La Maravilla depicts a 1950s squatter community on the edge of Phoenix. The community, Buckeye Road, questions notions of U.S. American identity as middle-class, WASP, and heterosexual. Buckeye can easily be viewed as a romanticized utopia that offers an alternative to consumer capitalism, urban sprawl, the disintegration of community, and the loss of spiritual values in the second half of the twentieth century. I argue, however, that the novel consistently undercuts both its own romanticism and our romanticized readings of it.

Evil, Madness, and the Occult in Argentine Poetry by Melanie Nicholson (review)

MLRy 100.3, 2??5 849 poem from the effortto set independence on a constructive course. It would also rob Heredia, in his admonitions against war, of his association with the strong humanist current that preceded and transcends what has come to be called modernity. That is why Ruben Dario, in his passion forpeace in the last years of his life,attacked promi? nent European vanguardists and invoked both medieval and Renaissance humanists in that cause. In his apparent need to leave untroubled the assertion that 'Niagara' is closely re? lated to 'En el teocalli de Cholula' Bush gives the formerpoem little scrutiny,choosing judiciously the 1825 rather than the 1832 version, but without elucidating some as? pects of the poem that might have demonstrated Heredia's relative modernity, such as his lesser regard for rhyme and classical allusions as compared to Bello and Olmeda. In regarding as phantasmagoric the evocation of palm trees, Bush undervalues the 'no' in '^Por que no miro | [. . .] | las palmas jay! Las palmas deliciosas [. . .]?', in lines that speak of nostalgia provoked by political exile, with a metonym substituting forthe Cuban nation before the deeply desired nationhood has been achieved, forthe 'Cuba, Cuba' ofthe 'Himnodel desterrado'. At the end of his book Bush examines Juan Maria Gutierrez's anthology of Spanish American poetry of 1846 and undertakes illuminating re-evaluations of some neglec? ted works included in that collection. Yet in his arguments Bush, like Paz, overlooks Paraguay, the firstofthe Spanish American republics and formany decades the most peaceful and prosperous of them, even though in salient topics that he treats?free trade, the constitution, the Church, mestizaje, indigenous culture, industrialization, poetry?that country offersa paradigmatic alternative to the failed policies employed elsewhere. The capacity of this important book to be a persuasive revision of the period is jeopardized by unconvincing new interpretations of certain poems, and poems are the crux of the matter. University of Toronto Keith Ellis Evil, Madness, and the Occult in Argentine Poetry. By Melanie Nicholson. Gainesville , FL: University Press of Florida. 2002. xxii + 201 pp. ?40.95. ISBN 08130 -2482-x. The work of three poets, Olga Orozco, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Jacobo Fijman, is studied in this volume. Adopting a distance from the 'current trend toward historical contextualization of literaryproduction' (p. xix), Melanie Nicholson relates the poets' inner journeys to a centuries-long esoteric tradition, which is charted in detail. The inward focus is also predicated on the questionable notion that Argentine sociopolitical reality marginalizes poets. The firstmain chapter, 'The Esoteric Tradition in Literature', plots a progression from Roman mystery cults, through Golden Age mystics and Neoplatonists, German Romantics, French symbolists and decadents, and finally to the surrealists, who, according to Nicholson, like the earlier poets, in their writings sought the sacred, although in human consciousness, not in nature. The three Argentine poets are seen to share this belief in the sacredness of the poetic word. Two chapters are devoted to Orozco: 'Gnostic and Hermetic Discourse in the Poetry of Olga Orozco' and 'The Occult as Revelation and Power of Passage in Orozco's Poetry'. Nicholson perceives the occult as the organizing principle in Orozco's poetry from the 1960s until En el reves del cielo (1987), which definitively recognizes failure, the dominance of gnostic pessimism over the more optimistic hermeticism . The second chapter correlates Orozco's work with alchemy (and makes 850 Reviews connections to other modern poets, and to Carl Jung). The discussion next moves to divination, particularly astrology, before concluding with magic, specifically with the poem 'Para destruir a la enemiga', parts of which resemble 'an actual rite of sorcery' (p. 59). The author, noting the feminine direction in Orozco's poetry from the mid1970s , speculates that the enemiga could be the third party of a love triangle; and yet, in an argument which, firstand foremost, is based on the systematic interpretation of keywords, the traditional poetic correspondence enemigajloved one is ignored. This is more a portrait of a self-sufficienttechnician than of a poet, and does not reflectthe strong human-connectedness which Orozco articulates in her prologue to Antologia poetica (1985). Jill Kuhnheim, well known to the author, and who suggested that a gnostic reading of Orozco...

On althusser's immanentist structuralism: reading montag reading althusser reading spinoza

This article investigates the way in which the Althusserian notions of structure and structural causality, elaborated in his early work and especially in Reading Capital, are constructed on the basis of the Spinozist concept of immanent causality. In particular, it argues that this construction necessarily involves a novel, radical conception of the whole, an “immanent holism,” opposing the two complementary, traditional conceptions of the whole, the atomistic and the transcendent. Further, this novelty is the counterpart of a necessary, constitutive tension of the notion in question.

‘Papa AK47’ or Lolita in Africa

Written in English from a lusophone region, Sousa Jamba’s Patriots has suffered critical neglect through occupying an interstitial space created by the artificial separation of anglophone and lusophone texts. This paper is a critical intervention aimed at making the novel available to a wider audience and situating it within current debates on the national and the transnational in contemporary literature. The article situates Patriots within a transnational tradition of writing on modern warfare primarily by drawing on the work of Paul Fussell and Tobey Herzog. The article notes the structural similarities between Patriots and two classic novels of war, Stephen Crane’s Red badge of courage and Erich Maria Remarque’s All quiet on the Western Front. As a war novel, Patriots problematizes and questions notions of Angolan identities, belonging and nation. The article also draws attention to the contradictions inherent in the representation of women and war in the text. Jamba’s anti-war stance is examined in relation to his representation of woman and his critique of the militarised, gerontocratic, patriarchal structuring of Unita society.